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Exploring UFOs and Extraterrestrial LifeThu, 17 Aug 2017 22:30:16 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3.1UFO Book Review: Extraterrestrials and the American Zeitgeisthttp://www.openminds.tv/ufo-book-review-extraterrestrials-american-zeitgeist/27952
http://www.openminds.tv/ufo-book-review-extraterrestrials-american-zeitgeist/27952#commentsFri, 30 May 2014 22:02:47 +0000http://www.openminds.tv/?p=27952As author Ken Hollings has recently shown in his book Welcome to Mars (2014), the US in the 1950s, as opposed to our present day view of a decade defined by Eisenhower, the Cold War and Leave It to Beaver, was one of rampant experimentation: politically (the broadening of the Truman Doctrine and the nuclear arms race), sociologically (the development of the suburbs, automobile culture, and rampant consumerism) and culturally (Lenny Bruce, the Beats, free jazz, existential philosophy, the folk revival and French New Wave film, among others). These seeds would later ferment into the Cultural Revolution and Civil Rights eras of the 1960s.

By far one of the most fascinating and – according to author Aaron John Gulyas, a history professor at Flint, Michigan – subversive critiques of the schizoid nature of postwar America – one where technology alternately promises a utopian future or destroys everything – was that of the alien contactee movement, which aside from a few odd cases of physical, psychic or telepathic encounters (helpfully recounted here), began in 1952 with George Adamski’s first contact with Orthon, a benevolent “space brother” from the planet Venus.

Though Gulyas remains undecided concerning the authenticity of Adamski’s claims, it seems fairly obvious, at least since Jim Moseley’s debunking efforts of nearly 50 years ago, that Adamski, with his science fiction (his novel Pioneers of Space,from which much of his later contactee claims were derived, was published in 1949) and Theosophically-influenced occult roots (he started a movement in the 1930s named “The Royal Brotherhood of Tibet” and, as with the Theosophists’ otherworldly “masters” that have throughout history made contact with and guided humanity, Adamski’s aliens originate from planets within our solar system) seemed primed to utilize the newly-minted – and then wildly popular – flying saucer mythology as a means of disseminating his decades-old message of peace, love and interstellar brotherhood.

Adamski’s first book regarding his alien encounters.

Gulyas also discusses the religious aspects of the contactees, in particular George Van Tassel’s contact with Ashtar, George King’s Aetherius Society, Truman Betherum’s anti-establishment Aura Rhanes, George Hunt Williamson’s proto-von Däniken claims of alien influence on ancient civilizations (which, apart from the disclosure movement is currently perhaps the most culturally significant UFO subject; witness the success of the History Channel’s recent Ancient Aliens television series [2010-present]), and Albert Bender’s visitation by the menacing, ghostly Men in Black, an encounter that occurred roughly contemporaneously with Adamski’s meeting with Orthon.

Contrasting Adamski’s benevolent, blonde-haired Orthon with Bender’s sinister Men in Black, Gulyas makes a compelling case for how contactee literature roughly approximates the dichotomous nature of that highly anomalous decade of the 1950s: an era of either utopian promise – including meetings with our advanced space brothers who will lead us into a new golden age – or dystopian nightmare. In the case of the latter, Cold War era concerns of Communist infiltration and subversiveness led to FBI investigations of US citizens, and flying saucer groups in particular. It has been speculated that the Men in Black may have been nothing more than government agents; Bender, perhaps fantasy prone or suffering from some form of paranoid delusion, imagined a routine governmental investigation into his group, the International Flying Saucer Bureau, to be a visitation from demonic, otherworldly beings.

Gulyas writes that “while the contactee phenomenon persisted through the 1970s and 1980s, the major shift in thinking was that theories of extraterrestrial visitation shifted to a much darker vision,” a vision Bender’s visitors in some ways anticipated. This vision, explains Gulyas, manifested through two main ideas: the alien abduction narrative – via the contact claims of Elizabeth Klarer (1954-1963), the abductions of Antonio Villas Boas (1957) and Betty and Barney Hill (1961), the Paul Bennewitz affair (1979-1988), Whitley Streiber’s Communion (1987), and the modern day abduction/hybrid alien claim, with its (often disturbing) sexual overtones – and the political conspiracy theory concerning governmental knowledge of crashed flying saucers and subsequent alien colonization of Earth; this was, after all, post-Kennedy assassination, post-Watergate America and governmental conspiracies became increasingly voguish. These cover-up theories, kept alive by the subsequent disclosure movement, have their roots in Frank Scully’s investigation of the crashed saucer at Aztec, New Mexico (now a largely debunked hoax) (1950), Donald Keyhoe’s speculations (1950, 1953) that the US government is engaged in a vast cover-up of alien visitation spurred by the use of nuclear warheads (in much the same way that nuclear blasts brought Earth to the attention of various Venusian and Martian beings who made contact with the likes of Adamski), Bender’s Men in Black, Adamski’s “Silence Group” (first mentioned in 1957), Frank Edwards’ best-selling books (1966, 1967), the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico flying saucer crash as initially recounted by Charles Berlitz and William Moore (1980) and the surrounding Wright Patterson, Hangar 18 and Area 51 memes.

Albert Bender with a drawing of one of the Men in Black he claims to have encountered.

Much of this speculation concerning government cover-up can be traced to early saucerologist dissatisfaction with the Air Force’s explanations for the UFO phenomenon, most famously J. Allen Hynek’s “swamp gas,” and the belief that rapid advances in technology are the result of back-engineered alien machinery retrieved from various crashed saucer and/or secretive government contact made with space beings. The most sordid (and irresponsible) of theories – such as those propagated by William Cooper and John Lear in the 80s and 90s – combines government cover-up and abduction memes into one vast, overarching conspiracy theory involving aliens acting in collusion with the US government in an effort to abduct and experiment upon unsuspecting civilians, and of an ongoing interstellar warfare in which Earth has become a battlefield.

By far the most interesting – and revelatory – portions of Gulyas’ book are those chapters that trace the modern abduction and exopolitical themes of the UFO phenomenon to the contactees of the 1950s, in part because Gulyas is among the first historians to attempt to connect these contactees of the classic flying saucer era to our modern age, regarding them as similar cultural expressions. Previous studies, Gulyas argues, regard contactees as a product of Cold War hysteria or as new religious movements and have tended to ignore them as a useful means of examining subjects as diverse as “military policy, the changing organizational structure of the US government, popular culture [and] the use of media,” all of which are explored in Gulyas’ book. Indeed, Gulyas carefully traces the various sociocultural factors (such as Theosophy and science fiction, consumerism and Cold War politics) that contributed to the contactee phenomenon; certainly Richard Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1950) and Ray Palmer’s “Shaver Mystery” (1945-1949) inspired the contactees as much as any silvery objects in the sky.

Gulyas contends that the contactee movement, believed to have ended in the early 1960s around the same time that the Civil Rights and Vietnam era took hold of the public’s attention, has in fact continued to the present, though like any cultural phenomenon, its features have changed with the times. Observes Gulyas, these “storytellers exist on a parallel track to the Beats, the counterculture of the sixties, the New Age movement of the 1970s, and the ennui and paranoia of the 1980s and 1990s.” With this in mind, it seems appropriate that Bender’s sinister Men in Black, and not Adamski’s Orthon, seems to have captured the conspiratorially-minded imagination of the present, from Hollywood films (Men in Black [1997] and its two sequels) to television (The X-Files [1990-1998];the time travelers on Fringe [2008-2013] are basically a modified variation).

Actors Tommy Lee Jones (left) and Will Smith as Men in Black. (Credit: Columbia Pictures)

Refreshingly, Gulyas’ Extraterrestrials and the American Zeitgeist makes no claims to the truth of the contactee experience, yet instead offers a readable, jargon-free, well-researched and insightful analysis of the contactee’s cultural impact and continued relevance, charting its various manifestations intelligibly and authoritatively. It is a welcome addition to a handful of books offering a penetrative and balanced exploration of the psychological and sociological importance of the UFO phenomenon.

Extraterrestrials and the American Zeitgeist can be found on Amazon.com.

]]>http://www.openminds.tv/ufo-book-review-extraterrestrials-american-zeitgeist/27952/feed0The Enrique Castillo-Rincon alien contact casehttp://www.openminds.tv/enrique-castillo-rincon-alien-contact-case/27428
http://www.openminds.tv/enrique-castillo-rincon-alien-contact-case/27428#commentsTue, 06 May 2014 18:06:09 +0000http://www.openminds.tv/?p=27428The following case from South America in the 1960s and 1970s presents one of the most well documented and captivating alleged extraterrestrial contact experiences to date.

The first contact with the unknown

Enrique Castillo-Rincon (Credit: Blue Dolphin Publishing)

In June 1963, Enrique Castillo, a thirty year old man, was working for the power utility company in Costa Rica to build an observation outpost near the top of the Irazu volcano. One day, along with two colleagues, he saw two circle-shaped orange objects in the sky with a diameter of about one hundred and twenty feet that were flying at eight hundred feet over the crater. As he wrote in his book OVNI: Gran Alborada Humana (UFO: A Great New Human Dawn), one of the two objects was falling out of the sky in a “falling leaf” movement (many UFOs are reported to fly as if they were leaves falling from a tree) and changed its color to a leaden hue. Castillo and his colleagues began feeling a terrible itch throughout their bodies. Suddenly, some sort of periscope came out of the UFO’s dome. On its top there was a hammer-shaped object that rotated rapidly and emitted a purple light. After a few minutes, the periscope was drawn back and the aircraft disappeared at high speed.

The three witnesses, despite being puzzled, were totally aware of the fate that awaits those who tell stories which seemingly belong to the twilight zone; that’s why, at first, they decided not to reveal anything. In the next few hours, however, they suffered from strong dizziness and vomiting. Therefore, for fear of having been exposed to radiation, they went to a hospital in San Jose. However, no radiation was detected.

Irazu Volcano (Credit: Rafael Golan/CC3.0)

Disturbing phenomena

If the Castillo affair were over at this point, it would be nothing but an interesting sighting of an unidentified flying object whose proximity produced tangible physical effects.

On the contrary, the case is much more complex and multifaceted.

One night, two months after the sighting, Castillo heard a strange noise echoing in his head. Soon, he realized that he had heard the weird sound before, the day he and his colleagues saw the two flying saucers. Moreover, this time the noise was heard not only by Castillo, but also by his wife, Beatriz.

After these events, Castillo’s interest in UFO matters increased exponentially and he founded a group which studied UFO-related phenomena. In 1968, he moved to Brasilia for work. Five years had passed after the first sighting and the weird events seemed to have finally abandoned his life. Then, one day the mysterious made another appearance in Castillo’s everyday life. He was driving from Sao Paulo to Brasilia when a circular orange ball of light started to fly stationary over his car for a long distance, causing a lot of vibration in the chassis, steering problems and radio malfunctions.

This was just the first in a series of odd events. In 1969, the mysterious incidents continued. One Sunday, while Castillo was in line at a cinema to see the film “Barbarella”, a young man introduced himself as Cyril Weiss. He told Castillo that he was a representative of a wholesale distribution company in Switzerland and asked him permission to see the movie along with him. Castillo agreed and after watching the movie accompanied Mr. Weiss to the hotel where he resided. Mr. Weiss invited Castillo to come to the hotel the next day. During this meeting the two talked about several issues, and Mr. Weiss said that he believed the UFO phenomena was just a hoax.

A solid friendship was born and Castillo started to meet Mr. Weiss often. However, Castillo began to notice many oddities in his friend’s behavior. The episode that stunned Castillo most regards a car accident. One day, while driving along with Mr. Weiss, Castillo ran a dog over. A little child witnessed the accident and started to cry because his poor dog had died. Mr. Weiss showed an utter impassiveness, just stating that the boy would soon submit to the inevitability of what had happened. Castillo reported that Mr. Weiss’ look seemed totally indifferent, with no room for empathy.

Castillo started to be puzzled by the Swiss gentleman. He spoke Spanish fluently with no accent, and during another rendezvous, in evident contradiction with what he had told Castillo a few days earlier, said that he was sure that there could be extraterrestrial entities not only on other planets but also in some uninhabited areas on Earth.

One day, Mr. Weiss suddenly announced that he would go abroad for a long time. However, as we shall see, Castillo would meet Mr. Weiss again in the future, in a totally different disguise.

Contact

The cover of Rincon’s book. (Credit: Blue Dolphin Publishing.)

It was 1973, four years had passed since Castillo’s last meeting with Mr. Weiss and everything seemed back to normal. In the meantime, Castillo had moved to Bogota, Colombia. One day, he received a phone call from someone named Karen, a Mexican woman who told him that she had been given his telephone number by some “extraterrestrial masters” who wanted to contact him.

Castillo, just like most rational people, thought it was a facetious joke, but still decided to meet the woman. She turned out to be very persuasive in her assertions and, consequently, Castillo started to attend meetings held by a group of people who claimed to be in contact with aliens from Andromeda (a galaxy at 2.3 million light-years from Earth) who had allegedly conveyed various messages to humans through automatic writing.

In October, 1973, one evening, the members of the UFO group had reached the top of a hill and were waiting for an announced contact with the extraterrestrials. To everybody’s disappointment, no spacecraft appeared on the scene but some members received a telepathic communication by a voice which said that everybody would be contacted at noon the day after.

At that time Castillo was at home, focused and ready to receive a message, despite being highly doubtful because, until then, he had not received anything. Suddenly a voice, loud in his head, called and urged him to write. Castillo began to fill up several pages, while hearing a disturbing noise that reminded him the one he had heard ten years before when he and his colleagues sighted two UFOs. The content of what he transcribed shows strong similarities with the communications received in those years by other contactees (from George Adamski to Howard Menger and Daniel Fry, just to mention the most famous and debated cases). They alluded to a Third World War, future disasters, and the arrival of “space brothers”.

The messages continued over the following days until the end of October, when Castillo was told the date of an upcoming physical contact, set for November 3, although the exact place had not been communicated yet (Castillo declared it would be near a lake). At the same time, Castillo’s oneiric activity grew exponentially, providing him with other clues about the place where the meeting would occur.

On November 3, the day of the alleged contact, Castillo reached a lake at about 80 kilometres from Bogota and recognised what he had seen in a dream, a ball placed under the roots of a tree in the middle of a clearing. He took it in his hands and it began to emit thin rays of light and, after a few minutes, two flying saucers appeared. They were similar to those Castillo had spotted in Costa Rica ten years before. The two UFOs approached Castillo, producing strong orange rays like a searchlight towards the ground. Two figures in gray uniforms came out of the light, they wore boots and helmets with visors. Meanwhile, a voice in Castillo’s head told him not to worry and suggested that he climb on-board. Despite being a wee bit reluctant, Castillo walked within the range of the searchlight and then he was lifted on board.

He was forced to undress and underwent a microbial decontamination inside an empty hexagonal room. A door suddenly appeared on a wall and two men entered the room. To Castillo’s utmost astonishment, one of the two men turned out to be Cyril Weiss, the mysterious Swiss man he had met four years earlier. The “Swiss” said that his real name was Krishnamerck and accompanied Castillo into another room where there were other beings, all similar to Weiss (the classic “Nordic alien”).

Castillo asked several questions and was always given a reply. The Pleiadians told him that they had a lot of bases on Earth, that the first contact dated back to thousands years before Christ and that they have been actively influencing our technological development. Their spacecrafts could become invisible so as not to frighten humanity which was not ready yet for the revelation of an alien presence. Many Pleiadian emissaries, as communicated to Castillo, were already among the population and aimed to create groups to cooperate with humans.

That was just the first in a series of physical contacts with the Pleiadians which continued until January 1975 into a sort of crescendo. Castillo claimed of having been taken to a base in the Andes where both humans and aliens cooperated together, as well as to a submarine base in the Mariana Trench at about 5,000 metres under the sea. On both occasions, Castillo allegedly met extraterrestrial masters of wisdom who warned him about future disasters and conflicts that would devastate the planet should a “shift in our consciousness” not occur in time.

Pros and Cons

From the outset, one would legitimately think that Castillo invented at most of what he had claimed. In fact, the only undoubted aspect of the whole story is the beginning, the sighting that occurred in 1963 with his colleagues and the subsequent physical ailments. But it would be too easy to dismiss his experiences as mere reveries.

The first consideration is that anybody who wished to invent a story of alien contacts, would not include some elements that, even at first sight, tend to appear totally ridiculous. All the data and information relating to the names of the extraterrestrial beings, the encounter with three meters tall inhabitants of Mercury and Venus (uninhabited planets according to the information available to date), the New Age style messages about nuclear wars and the need to educate a new generation to make it aware of its role, are certainly elements that can make you laugh for their extreme banality and/or presumed nonsense, but it is exactly their banality that should lead us to take into consideration the possibility that Castillo had merely, and honestly, reported what he was told.

Indeed, if you carefully analyse the various details of this case you will be probably inclined to believe that Castillo is not a hoaxer.

First of all, you should keep in mind that Castillo was not the only one who received these sorts of messages. Other members in his group and, most of all, members of groups from all over the world made similar accounts in those years, as if a lot of humans were told the same story by unknown entities.

Secondly, it is pretty evident that the entire story shows striking parallelisms with the Friendship affair, at its peak between 1956 and 1978 in most part of the world, contacts with alien beings with seemingly peaceful intents, which approached small groups of humans and started a collaboration.

Not to mention, the declarations made by Castillo about UFO-crashes, reverse-engineering operations and mind guided spaceships; all details that nowadays are being discussed even on TV but that in the 1970’s were not well known or talked about.

Conclusions

Rincon speaking about his experiences at a UFO conference. (Credit: Exopolitics Institute)

In any case, the big question does not concern the possible authenticity of what Castillo specifically reported but, why? In that period of time there was a plethora of highly homogeneous and similar stories.

None of these contactees have gained economic profit, nor have they convinced the masses of the truth of their experiences. They have never contradicted themselves, nor they have changed their testimonies, despite the general hilarity with which their reports were received, they have not attempted to convert or deceive anybody.

But… what if they were deceived? Who can be sure that that the entities they came into contact with were sincere in regards to their origins, their looks and their true intents?

Just keep in mind that, until seventy years ago, these beings claimed to come from Fairyland, Tir nan Og, Magonia, or Hell. Now the frame of reference has changed, and these entities allegedly come from Mars, Venus, Pleiades, Zeta Reticuli. If they are real, are they telling the truth? Nobody knows.

]]>http://www.openminds.tv/enrique-castillo-rincon-alien-contact-case/27428/feed3Woman still traumatized by 1960s UFO encounterhttp://www.openminds.tv/woman-still-traumatized-by-1960s-ufo-encounter-1193/24651
http://www.openminds.tv/woman-still-traumatized-by-1960s-ufo-encounter-1193/24651#commentsThu, 31 Oct 2013 21:32:40 +0000http://www.openminds.tv/?p=24651A former resident of Novi, Michigan is still traumatized by a UFO encounter from decades ago.

Nancy Tremaine says she saw a saucer-shaped UFO floating in the sky above her neighborhood in the early 1960s when she was just twelve years old. She can’t remember exactly when the sighting occurred, but thinks it was during the summer of 1961. She says that she was playing at a friend’s house when the friend’s father called the girls outside to see the UFO. She describes the craft as a silver saucer-shaped object, adorned with red, green, and white lights. And she says these lights were either rotating or pulsating.

Tremaine says the next thing she saw was a light beam shooting down from the UFO onto the unmarked police car of an off-duty officer who was doing security at a nearby construction site. According to local news site HomeTownLife.com, former Novi Police Chief Lee Begole was on duty at the police station on the night of the sighting. He acknowledges that dispatch received a call from the off-duty officer at the construction site. Begole remembers, “He called into dispatch and said there was a strange object overhead.” Dispatchers reportedly received multiple calls from other witnesses that night, one of whom was the wife of a city council member.

After seeing the beam of light shooting down from the UFO, she recalls that her friend’s father told her (Tremaine) to run home. That’s when the event allegedly became more than a simple sighting of an unknown craft. Tremaine claims that, as she was running home, she felt a sensation “like being shocked.” The next thing she remembers is being in her house. She claims she was abducted by the UFO. Although she doesn’t remember much about the encounter, she says some of the experience has been coming back to her lately as a result of regression therapy.

She recently stated, “It was a very traumatizing experience that stayed with me,” and she claims she’s been taken by UFOs several times, but the experiences are never “harmful or scary.”

Hometown/Observer & Eccentric photojournalist John Heider recently joined Tremaine as she returned to the location in Novi where the 1961 event occurred. Watch his interview with Tremaine at the top of this article.

HomeTownLife.com explains, “She’s asking Novi residents if they remember that night, and if so, would they reach out to her. Putting together the pieces is one step in her healing process.”

Meier’s U.S. media representative, Michael Horn, is bringing the case to schools, colleges and universities in the form of a multimedia presentation. This presentation is said to contain physical evidence from the Meier case, including UFO photos, video and audio recordings, and metal samples.

UFO Contactee Eduard 'Billy' Meier

Horn feels that the evidence from this case is “ironclad,” and he states, “All previous UFO information, such as Roswell, the Air Force sightings, China, etc., is basically anecdotal and, while entertaining, is without any real, hard evidence. You can think of it as ‘UFOs 101’. The Meier case is overflowing with hard evidence, which is why I refer to it as the ‘Graduate Level Course’. And when you are educated about it you’ll wonder why you never heard about it before. I’ll discuss the answer to that too.”

Horn thinks that presenting the evidence to students, teachers, and critical thinkers in an academic environment is more productive than presenting it at a UFO-oriented event where he would be “preaching to the choir.”

Michael Horn’s Billy Meier multimedia presentation will be taking place at schools beginning in 2011.